Sunday, March 22, 2009

Hot Air's Religion Problem: What I want...

What I want from Hot Air: a comment policy that, after a warning, would involve the deletion of posts that are clearly designed to troll for religious fights, with eventual banning. If they want to be a mainstream conservative blog, then they're going to learn the hard way that religious bigots cannot be allowed to take control of their comment threads.

It seems as if every comment thread involving the Pope, or religion in general, turns into a Catholic bashing thread by the bigots there. Notwithstanding that Ed Morrissey is a Catholic, and Michelle Malkin might be Catholic but is at least Christian, the bigots run the show at Hot Air. A basic rule of thumb: if the post has anything to do with religion, the Pope, abortion, or sex - it will always eventually turn into a Catholic bashing thread (perhaps with a little anti-Mormonism if Mitt Romney happens to be mentioned).

So the excerpts I'm posting here really aren't out of the ordinary. It's just the stuff I could find in my free time. This sort of stuff happens so often that it's obvious they know of this problem.

They either refuse to acknowledge the problem, or do not care about the problem, or hope that it can be ignored by others who do not read the blog's comments. That is why I am going to expose all of them. If they are not shamed, then they can own these comments. If they think there's nothing wrong with a popular conservative blog hosting these vile comments, let them defend it. One day, someone bigger than me is going to take notice. And by then, I'll have hundreds of these posts in the "Hot Air Bigots" category.

Ed banned me without warning two weeks ago for commenting on one of his columns against funding Planned Parenthood. I wrote that all government funds to the Catholic church and related organizations should be banned if the test was covering up child molesting because the Catholic church had a far higher incidences than PP and because priests were the ones doing the molesting.

He called me a bigot, which ticked me off.

I think you're just upset about the anti-Catholic comments because you and Ed really can't defend some of them.

Given what appears to be an organizational mandate to violate state reporting requirements for statutory rape and child abuse, the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations should get stripped of all government funding for any of its activities. This amendment doesn’t cut off funds for health activities; it restores some long-overdue accountability for the Catholic Church’s lawless behavior, supported by such funding in the past.-Fixed it for you, Ed.

jim m on March 5, 2009 at 5:56 PM

Jim M - anti-Catholic bigotThere, I fixed it for you.

The constant childish digs at my faith are lame and off-topic. When the Catholic Church starts receiving hundreds of millions of dollars a year from DC in grants, then come back and trot out your Jack Chick mentality in the comments section. Until then … buh-bye, troll.

Ed Morrissey on March 5, 2009 at 6:43 PM

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You want to explain how my post was bigoted? Or was it simply because Ed couldn't answer the question so he decided to ban me? [And, by the way, Catholic hospitals do get about $90 billion a year in funding from the state and federal governments.]

If a premiere conservative blog wants to become known as a place where Catholics must constantly battle over questions regarding their faith, irrespective of the merits of such questions, that's a problem because it indicates a conservative intolerance towards Catholics even if not bigoted.

However, the comments at Hot Air go far beyond mere questions, and involve open hostility. In your case, it's clear that your representation that the Catholic Church has an organizational mandate in favor of child rape is disgusting. But don't worry, I'll check that thread later tonight to see if there were other instances of your views of Catholicism which resulted in your termination there.

Sydney, I simply took what Ed wrote about Planned Parenthood and substituted the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations for PP. If Ed can describe PP as having an "organizational mandate" to not report for 5 or 6 violations, then how can he say that the Catholic Church didn't have the same mandate given the thousands that it initially didn't report.

Thanks, Sydney. I've noticed this as well. It's truly embarrassing that a conservative website could draw so many anti-Catholic nutjobs. I don't for a second believe they are anywhere near a majority of the commentariat, but there are enough of them to avoid the comments section - kind of like I avoid any post bylined Allahpundit.

“If God had thought abortion was murder, then why didn’t He say so more clearly in the Bible? He apparently thought it was significant enough in the Old Testament to tell people what types of clothes they could wear and what types of food they could eat, yet no explicit mention of abortion?

As to you Orthodox Catholics, if you don’t like what’s going on in the US, why don’t you move to Vatican City?

jim m on February 18, 2009 at 11:19 AM”

Faithful Catholics get out, doesn't quite have the ring of "Raus Juden", but the message is the same.

Often the day-laborers leave a urine stain on a wall and the local priests show up to declare it a vision of their “Queen of Heaven” as proof AMNESTY should be granted to these criminals. What a failed people, culture, religion, and country!!!!!

I stopped reading Hot Air three years ago because of the bigotry. You want to know why? Well this will explain why the anti-Catholic nutjobs congregate there.

AllahPundit himself is an anti-Catholic bigot. He had a couple of postings and his own comments reflected an anti-Catholic theme in them. I tried notifying AllahPundit several times via email and he never responded.

So I stopped reading it and eventually dropped HotAir from my blogroll.

You know... I never understood the whole "if it wasn’t mary, it could have been someone else" argument.

Clearly Jesus could have entered the world any way He wanted to. But we also know that the way He would ordain is the best way. He chose to come into the world through a woman and the woman He created to be His mother was Mary.